Associate Professor of English Brook Miller's new book released by Palgrave McMillan

Posted by Judy Korn on Thursday, Jan. 27, 2011

Palgrave Macmillan, the publishing company’s Education division, has released Brook Miller’s new book, America and the British Imaginary in Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Literature. A reception will be held in honor of Miller, associate professor of English, on Thursday, January 27, 2011, from 4:30 until 6:30 p.m. at LaFave House, 305 College Avenue, Morris. At 5:15 that evening, Miller will give a brief talk about the process of writing and publishing the book.

Miller researched varied British literary representations of America and Americans around the turn-of-the-century for the book. His work has received excellent reviews.

“Miller makes an especially donative intervention into the burgeoning field of transatlantic studies where culture, richly conceived, is registered as an issue of pedagogy and performance,” states Ian F.A. Bell, professor of American Literature at University of Keele. “He mounts a powerful challenge to the binaries of ‘high’ and ‘mass’ art, to existing notions of national affiliation and difference within what is acknowledged as one of those transitional decades where cultural energies are most vibrant. Sprightly traversing travel narratives, journalism and novels, both canonical and noncanonical, Miller negotiates matters of race and transformations in the economy to present a substantial diet of well-nuanced transnational understandings. Both fresh and accessible, with lively writing and well-judged research, we have here one of the most expressive contributions to a debate of increasing importance.”

New readings of the works of authors Joseph Conrad, Bram Stoker, Rudyard Kipling, Henry James, and a variety of lesser-known figures were the focus of Miller’s research for the book. He demonstrates that domestic and international pressures upon Britain made America and the idea of national character subjects of intensive political and popular scrutiny. Changes in Anglo-American relations had an impact upon evolving ideas about British identity.

For this project, Miller received funding from the National Humanities Center and the University of Minnesota’s Imagine Fund, Grant-in-Aid, and Institute for Advanced Studies programs. In addition, he received funding from the University of Minnesota, Morris’s Faculty Research Enhancement Funds (FREF). His new research explores representations of selfhood in modern British fiction. He has received Imagine, Grant-in-Aid, and FREF funding in support of this project.

The author of numerous articles in publications such as Modern Fiction Studies, Miller has published an article about Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction with three Morris students in an anthology from Cork University Press. He teaches Twentieth Century British literature, literary theory, and transnational approaches to literature. Miller earned a doctorate at Indiana University in 2003.

Miller's book is shelved in the UMM Scholarship Collection located on the fourth floor of Briggs Library.

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